


friendship and fate

by too_much_in_the_sun



Series: Coyote tales [2]
Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Male-Female Friendship, Navajo Character, The Moonlite All-Nite Diner, friends getting coffee together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-05
Updated: 2013-10-05
Packaged: 2017-12-28 11:21:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/991439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/too_much_in_the_sun/pseuds/too_much_in_the_sun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dana grows up in Night Vale. Fate draws her to the radio station, and Cecil Endishchee.</p><p>They hit it off immediately.</p>
            </blockquote>





	friendship and fate

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ThePaintedScorpionDoll](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThePaintedScorpionDoll/gifts).



Dana Flores wasn't born in Night Vale, but it's the only place she remembers living. Her parents drifted all over the Southwest looking for a place to raise their family, and Night Vale was the first where they were welcomed with open arms. Old Woman Josie had brought them cornbread as a housewarming gift, and Dana's first memory is of Josie braiding her hair and chatting with her mother. 

She had a normal childhood, for Night Vale. When Dana was five, her mother got a job and let Josie watch her in the daytime when both Mama and Papa were at work. She called Josie "grandma" and "abuela", and Josie taught her to sew, showed her how to make sacrifices in the bloodstone circle, played hide-and-seek and Go Fish, tucked her in at night. Angels had not yet come to Old Woman Josie, but her house nevertheless always felt serene, the air honey-like with comfort and love.

Dana went off to school when she was six, armed with a MotoKops 2200 lunchbox and a hug from her mother, father, and Josie each. Most of the kids looked like her, though Manuel used a wheelchair and Jenny had the head of a hawk. But one of the boys in her class had pale, milk-white skin, and when they were led out to recess, she asked him whether he was sick. He stared at her and said "I don't think so."

When Josie came to walk her home (Mother was at her job at the hospital now, as a surgeon, which was like a doctor but not) she went to her for a hug and informed her of this boy whose skin was white as flour. "Why is he that color?" she asked, certain that, as always, Josie would have an answer.

"I don't think anyone really knows why people have different colors, mija," said Josie, thoughtfully. "He's not sick, though, just not the same color as you."

"OK," Dana said happily, and there the memory ends. It's the first time she remembers questioning the world and getting an answer that didn't quite satisfy.

The next year, in second grade, they started learning Weird Spanish -- the other second grade class was learning Double Spanish. Dana excelled. "You are so smart," her mother sighed as she took the braids from her hair one evening. "My beautiful, smart daughter."

Cecil was, is, ten years older than her almost to the day, so she never had classes with him. His little brother Jimmy was in the same class as her, though, and one day Cecil came to pick him up from school. He was very tall, and Dana lost interest in him as soon as he left.

She was valedictorian in high school, and her physics teacher asked her if she was going on to major in physics at one of the colleges that had courted her from outside Night Vale.

"No," she said. "I think I'll work for a while before I go to college."

* * *

As it happened, Night Vale Community Radio was hiring interns that summer, and she and Manuel put their applications in together. Both of them were told to come in on the next full-moon day for training.

This was when Dana met Cecil Endishchee.

She'd heard him on the radio before, talked with him on the phone briefly for her interview. She'd expected him to be shorter. 

He had brown skin, deeply tanned, weather-worn, with laugh lines framing his lips. Tall, with long arms and legs and kind dark-green eyes. His hair was long, black, loosely braided, tied with a bit of leather at the end. On his left wrist he wore a chunky silver bracelet with a piece of turquoise in the center. Dana observed all this as she sat down in a chair next to Manuel and another intern candidate.

"Welcome to Night Vale Community Radio," Cecil said, his voice as silky-smooth as it was on the radio every night. "Internships here are dangerous, but provide valuable experience and the possibility of being hired permanently. If you wish to leave this job at any time, we will write you a letter of recommendation for whatever job you wish to pursue." He smiled at them. "Now, the first thing I'd like to do is give you all a tour of the station."

* * *

Dana volunteered for night shifts. The station wasn't far from her family's house (it didn't seem to be far from anywhere in Night Vale), and she liked the short walk along the path lit by yellow arc-sodium streetlights. As a child she'd taken Night Vale's cosy safety for granted, had stayed out to play after sunset with impunity. Now as a young adult she appreciated that Night Vale was maybe one of the few places that she could walk home alone at night without needing to fear... certain things. 

The Secret Police were always watching, after all.

After her first shift assisting Cecil, she decided on a cup of coffee at the Moonlite All-Nite, and told Cecil about this.

"Oh," he said, his eyes still fading from all-over white back to their normal green. "Would you like a ride?"

"No thanks, I can get there on my own," she replied, shrugging on her jacket.

"I just mean that's where I'm going, too," he said.

"Well, okay."

Cecil was nothing but courteous, and his car smelled faintly of sage. The radio burbled softly, tuned to static instead of the hour of "various voices weeping in denial" that followed his show tonight. He hummed along, and did not speak. Dana stared out the window.

He parked, and just after he had locked the car, turned to her apologetically.

"Do you mind if I bring a friend?"

She tried to think if she knew of any of Cecil's friends. He was friendly with everyone in town, but no one she knew of was particularly close to him. And she was, at least for the near future, a reporter.

"Nope," she said. "I'll go get us a booth."

His friend, as it turned out, was a coyote. Was Coyote, specifically, with fur somewhere between desert-dust tan and red-fox rufous, and clever, human brown eyes. He bowed to her as he trotted up to the booth, and Cecil grinned awkwardly as Dana nodded back.

"He insists on having coffee with me," Cecil explained. "He helps me get information for the show, so he makes me pay."

"He doesn't mind," said Coyote. "Would you mind scratching my ears?" he said, tilting his head towards Dana. "I can never quite reach to get at the base."

She reached down and sank her fingertips into the soft, soft fur at the base of his large ears, scratching with her nails at the skin. He panted happily.

"Hire this one, Cecil," he said, with his tongue flopping slightly out of his mouth, looking like a dog rather than possibly a god. "She knows where to scratch."

"You know I can't do that," Cecil said mildly, stirring one packet of each sugar substitute into his coffee. Dana rubbed at the soft, clean fur of Coyote's ruff with her other hand.

"Well, that's not the only reason you should hire her." The waitress appeared and laid a bowl of coffee in front of Coyote. He bent away from Dana's hand to lap at it. "She has great potential, and she'll be very important to the future of Night Vale."

"Well, I'll take that into consideration," said Cecil, sipping his coffee. Dana ripped open a creamer pot and stirred it into her cup. The Moonlite All-Nite had a deal on 2 for 1 pots of coffee between midnight and 3 a.m., and she'd made use of it all through high school. It was convenient for late-night caffeine cravings.

Dana put her hand down to scratch Coyote's ears again, and he wagged his tail happily.

"Really, Cecil," he said, his voice terribly serious even as his body language said 'happy dog'. "You should consider hiring her. Also, she'll appreciate your archive of cat pictures."

Cecil blushed. "You didn't have to bring that up. I'm sorry to dump so much weirdness on you your first day, Dana," he said, turning to speak to her as she sipped her coffee (from a fresh pot, tasting like a pleasant summer morning before the heat got unbearable). 

"Cecil," she said, the first time she'd called him by his first name instead of 'Mister Endishchee'. "We live in Night Vale. I can handle a little weirdness."

"Good," said Coyote. "You'll need to."

* * *

He visits her in the dog park, brings her baskets of biscuits with honey and neat bowls of beans and rice, his eyes wise and sad, his ears perked attentively. "Cecil misses you," he says.

"We do text back and forth," she says, taking the basket from his jaws.

"Yes, well. He's made a sacrifice every night this week, and all of them for 'safe return from travel'." Coyote's tongue slips from his mouth, and he favors her with a doggy grin. "I have faith in your investigative abilities, Miss Flores. But Cecil would appreciate it if you'd come home someday."

"I'll try," she says, and later when she walks from the strange house into the empty desert, she thinks she sees a flash of black-tipped tail in the distance. Maybe it's just a coyote hunting. But maybe it's Coyote, leading her home.

_Night Vale needs you, Dana. You still have work to do._

**Author's Note:**

> Cecil's last name is spelled Nidishchii’ in Navajo. I've used the Anglicization Endishchee in the text, as it's from Dana's point of view.
> 
> edit: I realized somewhat belatedly, but this Cecil is inspired a little in appearance by the lovely art of palaceofposey on Tumblr. You can view some of her art of Cecil [here](http://palaceofposey.tumblr.com/tagged/pocecil).


End file.
